Compliance help comes in three shapes. GRC software (Vanta, Drata) watches your stack and tells you what’s broken. Consultants assess, advise, and hand you a roadmap. A managed service is the third shape: it includes the platform and the people, and those people hold the admin keys. The quickest way to classify a vendor is one question — when a control fails on a Tuesday, who fixes it? If the answer is “you do, with our guidance”, you’re looking at software or consulting wearing a managed label.
The model exists because the middle of a compliance program is operational, not advisory: integrations drop, evidence expires, employees join and leave, auditors ask follow-ups. Recurring tasks need recurring hours, and neither a dashboard nor a deliverable supplies those.
Agency’s engagement, detailed on Managed Compliance Services, covers platform administration, evidence pipelines, the policy library, access reviews, risk register upkeep, vendor reviews, questionnaire responses, and audit coordination across SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, CMMC 2.0, ISO 42001, HITRUST, and US data privacy laws — delivered by engineers you know by name, working from a playbook refined across 500+ programs delivered.
They’re adjacent layers. A vCISO supplies senior security leadership — strategy, roadmap, board and customer conversations — while the managed service supplies the execution underneath it. Agency bundles the two so decisions and follow-through come from one team.
You do. The instance, the data, and the auditor relationship belong to your company; the provider works inside them with scoped access. Agency’s partner agreements also lower the license cost itself — details on the Vanta Best Price Guarantee.
